The causes of ethnic conflict

Overview

Ethnic conflict, historical animosities and sectarianism and racism.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What is ethnic conflict?

   Model answer

   Ethnic conflict is sustained hostility between groups in which the parties are defined, by themselves or by each other, in ethnic terms, whether by ancestry, nationality, language or religion. The subject of the dispute is usually territory, political power, rights or resources rather than culture itself, but the sides are drawn along ethnic lines. It ranges in intensity from discrimination and avoidance, through protest, disorder and organised violence, to civil war.

2. 2

   Explain why territorial disputes are such a common cause of ethnic conflict.

   Model answer

   Because territory is indivisible in a way that most other issues are not: both parties want the same ground, so a gain for one is a loss for the other. Land also carries several things at once, namely political control and representation, economic resources such as farmland, water, minerals and ports, sites of religious or historical significance, and the group's claim to be a nation with a homeland. Compromise is therefore hard to construct, since dividing the territory satisfies neither the symbolic claim nor the security concerns of either side.

3. 3

   On what grounds do groups base competing claims to the same territory?

   Model answer

   Commonly on prior occupation, that their people were there first; on historic possession, that the land was once governed by them; on treaty or legal transfer; on religious significance, where the land or a specific site is held sacred; on present demographic majority; and on need, where a group argues it has nowhere else to go. Disputes are intractable partly because the two sides frequently rely on different grounds, so there is no shared criterion by which the claims could be compared.

4. 4

   How can demographic change turn into a territorial cause of conflict?

   Model answer

   Where political control follows population numbers, changes in the balance become politically charged. Settlement of one group in an area occupied by another, differential birth rates, and in-migration or out-migration all shift the balance, and each side may read the shift as a threat or a gain. Boundaries of electoral areas and administrative units then become disputed, since where the line is drawn determines who holds the local majority. Census results themselves can become contentious for the same reason.

5. 5

   What are historical animosities, and how are they transmitted between generations?

   Model answer

   Historical animosities are enduring grievances derived from past events such as conquest, dispossession, massacre, famine, defeat or discriminatory settlement. They are transmitted through family narrative, commemoration and anniversaries, monuments, songs, parades, murals and the account of history taught in separate schools. Because they are learned in childhood alongside identity itself, they are experienced as personal rather than historical, and young people can hold strong feelings about events long before their birth.

6. 6

   Why do two communities often hold incompatible accounts of the same past events?

   Model answer

   Because each account is assembled from that community's own experience, sources and losses, and is preserved by its own institutions. Events that are central to one narrative may be absent from the other; the same event may be described as a liberation by one and a conquest by the other; and each side tends to remember its own casualties in detail and the other side's less so. Separate schooling and separate media reinforce the divergence. This is why dealing with the past is usually one of the hardest elements of any settlement.

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